Chapter 13 #2
He showered — slowly, working around the tender spots with the patience of a man who has learned that hot water and time are the best available treatments for most of what Brett had applied — took Marv out into the cool November morning.
The campus was quiet, the Halloween decorations looking slightly exhausted in the daylight, a carved pumpkin near the library already beginning its seasonal collapse.
He walked at Marv's pace, which was the right pace for the morning, let the plan run through the background of his mind with the calm, methodical attention of a man who has gotten past the part where everything feels urgent and arrived at the part where it just needs to be done correctly.
He had work to do. Thursday would be the beginning of it.
Today, he and Marv walked.
? ? ?
The weeks that followed moved with the clean efficiency of a life that has found its structure and is executing it.
Gym before seven. Café Texas — Marv restored to full standing after the kolache incident, Bryan apparently having decided that one's dignity could be rebuilt through repeated successful catches, which Marv was achieving with increasing consistency.
Classes. Office hours, which were filling up now as mid-semester passed and the semester's back half began to assert its demands on the student population.
Thursday afternoons at the distillery with Lou, moving product, keeping his eyes open, building a picture in his head that he was slowly, carefully translating into the documentation Sue's husband needed.
Saturday mornings with the line dancing class, where Ethel had taken to positioning herself next to Gary for every session and offering improvement notes that were specific enough to suggest she'd been watching his footwork in detail since October.
Sunday dinners at Stu and Amber's, which became the fixed point around which everything else orbited — warm, reliable, entirely separate from the rest of it, the one place where Gary didn't have to be managing anything.
He met with David, Sue's husband, twice in November — not at the campus or the café or anywhere associated with his normal pattern, but at a quiet corner table in a restaurant on the far side of Renton that neither of them would have reason to visit normally.
David listened with the focused, undemonstrative attention of a man who spent his professional life assessing what people told him, asked precise questions, and gave Gary the same impression Sue had given him from the beginning: that he was operating from a specific plan that he'd had longer than Gary had known him, and that Gary was a useful addition to it rather than the originating force.
The evidence was building. Belle was keeping records — dates, quantities, a log of cash received that she maintained in a notes app on a phone she'd bought separately for cash and kept at the apartment of a college friend Jed had never met.
Gary's inventory observations from his Thursdays at the distillery were filling in the picture from the production side.
And Bill — quiet Bill, retired detective, hired eyes — turned out to be a less formidable obstacle than Gary had initially constructed him as, because Bill, David explained over the second meeting's coffee, had been quietly cooperating with the DA's office for six months, a fact neither Sarah nor Jed nor Brett knew, and which meant the surveillance Gary had been trying to evade was actually, in some technical sense, working in his favor.
Gary sat with that for a moment at the restaurant table.
"So Bill's been watching me for Jed and Brett," he said.
"And reporting to me," David said.
"The whole time."
"The whole time."
Gary looked at his coffee. "Sue's known this since October."
David's expression was perfectly neutral. "Sue knows most things."
Gary thought about Sue at the café table in early November, her cauldron purse on the chair beside her, telling him she trusted him. He thought about the particular smile she'd given him when he'd agreed to keep going to the distillery.
"She's something," he said.
"She really is," David agreed, in the tone of a man who found this both true and occasionally exhausting.
? ? ?
Thanksgiving arrived the way it does in college towns — with a sudden emptying of campus, the student population dispersing across the state and beyond in the forty-eight hours preceding the holiday until the paths and quads that had been busy all semester went quiet and wide.
Gary noticed the quiet the Monday before and found he didn't mind it. He had more room to think.
He was going to Stu and Amber's.
There had been no discussion about this.
The discussion that hadn't happened had happened sometime in October, during a Sunday dinner when Amber had mentioned Thanksgiving in the context of meal planning and looked at Gary in a way that contained the entire invitation and its acceptance simultaneously. Gary had nodded and that was that.
He arrived Wednesday evening, early enough to be useful.
The house smelled of the beginning stages of what Amber was clearly planning as a substantial operation — stock already going on the stove, something in the refrigerator that turned out to be two pies in various states of completion, a brine situation for the turkey that she directed him around carefully when he came through the kitchen.
Stu was at the kitchen table with a beer and the expression of a man who had learned that Thanksgiving week had specific jurisdictions and his did not include anything inside a ten-foot radius of the stove.
"You're helping her tomorrow," Stu told Gary.
"Obviously," Gary said, and took the beer that was offered and sat down.